Engaged Journalism: Past, Present, and Future
In a 2018 survey about engaged journalism practices, Impact Architects and the News Integrity Initiative sought to understand what engaged journalism meant to different organizations in the hopes of working toward a typology of engaged journalism — what it is, who does it, how it’s done, and why they do it. In late 2021, Impact Architects had an opportunity to once again take the temperature of engaged journalism with a follow up survey, this time working with Democracy Fund. The goal was to understand how the field of engaged journalism has changed and how it hasn’t. We also wanted to explore the relationship between engaged journalism and “equitable journalism,” a different approach that includes some aspects of engaged journalism, but is more explicitly concerned with social equity.
In 2018, we asked respondents to help define “engaged journalism.” A characteristic response highlights the major emphasis of engaged journalism at the time: “[Engaged journalism is] making editorial decisions based [on] a variety of community input rather than the knowledge of the editorial team.” This and responses like it showed that the core practices of engaged journalism included:
- Listening to audiences;
- Collaborating with audiences;
- Connecting with communities; and
- Audiences interacting with newsrooms through content.
At the time of this first survey, we found that engaged journalism was more than niche but less than pervasive across newsrooms. In our updated survey, we heard that many of the goals and motivations for engaged journalism were consistent. Most notably, however, respondents indicated a move toward equitable journalism alongside the commitment to engaged journalism.
Increased Integration Across Newsrooms, Consistent Goals and Motivations
The 2021 survey results offer some evidence that engaged journalism is much closer to being common practice among respondents, even if they don’t necessarily see it as pervasive in the field. A small number of respondents shared how engaged journalism is integrated in their newsrooms: 62% said that their newsrooms had been practicing engaged journalism for more than three years, more than half (54%) said that engaged journalism is the norm and a central part of everyone’s job, and another 31% said that their organization frequently practices engaged journalism and that most people do it on a frequent basis. This is a radical shift from the 2018 survey, where two-thirds of the survey respondents said that engagement journalism was the job of a specific employed staff member, suggesting that the practices weren’t widespread.
Respondents were split on the question about the prevalence of engaged journalism in the field as a whole. An equal number of respondents described it as “common,” “present but the responsibility of a few people,” and “uncommon and project based.” There’s other evidence that suggests engaged journalism is more prevalent. In early 2020, Carrie Brown cited job descriptions requiring engagement, engaged journalism roles at commercial media, and large online communities of practitioners as evidence that engaged journalism is “finally happening.” Moreover, the Online News Association gives out an award specifically for excellence in engaged journalism. And in February of 2022, Brown shared that 75% of CUNY engagement reporting alums were gainfully employed. In October 2021, KPCC announced a program designed “to link engaged journalism efforts in the newsroom to membership and revenue” for a group of public media newsrooms. This wouldn’t be possible if engaged journalism practices didn’t already exist.
The motivations for practicing engaged journalism remained largely the same in 2021 as they were in 2018, with one significant exception. In our 2018 survey, the major motivations for practicing engaged journalism were gaining audience trust, meeting community information needs, and revenue generation; for our 2021 respondents, revenue generation was no longer a major motivation. The consistency suggests that producing useful journalism and creating relationships with audiences was and continues to be a major motivating factor for practicing engaged journalism.
How journalists measure success — figuring out whether or not the motivations were actualized — also remained consistent. In our 2018 summary, we found that respondents typically relied on audience reach as measures of success, and we wrote that the metrics that “tell us the total reach of any piece of content don’t help us answer our questions about how [engaged journalism] practices are meeting communities’ information needs, building trust-based relationships, and contributing to organizational sustainability.” In the 2021 survey, respondents similarly identified analytics from Google and social media sites, membership numbers, and subscription numbers as the most commonly used success indicators for engaged journalism.
A Move Toward Equitable Journalism
The conversation about engaged journalism has expanded over the past two years to move beyond engaged journalism practices to fundamentally rethinking the relationship of news and information to power, (in)equity, and democracy, at least partly in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, US racial justice mobilizations, and increasing polarization. To reflect this shift, in our most recent survey, we added an option for motivations for practicing engaged journalism, “contributing to a more equitable society,” and the results help us understand this shift taking place in the field.
More than 80% of all respondents (be they people from newsrooms, freelancers, or people from support organizations) identified “contributing to a more equitable society” as a major motivating factor for practicing engaged journalism.
Given our secondary purpose of understanding engaged journalism in relation to equitable journalism, this result was significant. Upon revisiting the 2018 survey responses and, indeed, our questions, one thing becomes clear about the state of engaged journalism in 2018: The ultimate end was a news product. That’s not necessarily the case with equitable journalism.
Digging deeper into “equitable journalism,” we asked respondents to identify the state of equitable journalism in terms of how commonly it is practiced. We used Democracy Fund’s definition of equitable journalism as a guide: “Journalism that centers the genuine and immediate information gaps of whole communities and corrects persistent inequities.”
The results stand in stark contrast to the same question regarding engaged journalism mentioned above. When asked specifically about the state of equitable journalism, 78% of respondents said that it was either “uncommon” or “rare.” Thus this survey suggests engaged journalism, while not understood as pervasive, is more likely to be practiced than equitable journalism.
We also asked about the relationship between engaged and equitable journalism, and most survey respondents see the two practices as closely related. Forty two percent said that they were “strongly related,” such that engaged journalism is a precondition for equitable journalism, while 27% said they were “interrelated” and that “you can’t have one without the other.” Given the emphasis on “contributing to a more equitable society” as a motivating factor for engaged journalism, it’s not surprising that the respondents viewed a strong relationship between engaged journalism and equitable journalism. The view of this relationship holds at Democracy Fund as well
Looking to the future
Equitable journalism, that which “centers the genuine and immediate information gaps of whole communities,” doesn’t sound far off from how journalists in 2018 described engaged journalism: “making editorial decisions based on a variety of community input rather than the knowledge of the editorial team.” Community is the center, and members have the agency to identify the information gaps of a given community.
But it’s easy for the “agency of community members” to turn into “responsibility of community members,” and from there it’s not far from turning into the “burden of community members.” The result ends up being the same power imbalance that has led to the need for more direct engagement in the first place. That’s why the second part of the definition is important: “Journalism that centers the genuine and immediate information gaps of whole communities and corrects persistent inequities.”
One of the reasons we introduced equitable journalism into our 2021 survey was because engagement is a fundamental component of equitable journalism, as we defined it, but it is also different. Here’s one way we understand the distinction between engaged journalism and equitable journalism:
Angelica Das, Associate Director of Democracy Fund’s Public Square Program, explained the dynamic between “engaged” and “equitable” journalism like this: “Equity is the path to true engagement. We need newsrooms that are addressing structural inequality, repairing historic harm, and representing our multi-racial democracy — without them, we can’t realize a journalism that serves community information needs, builds trust, and grows audiences.” Places like City Bureau Chicago and the Documenters Network, Outlier Media, and Free Press’s News Voices and Media 2070 are examples of organizations that center the correcting of inequities as part of their missions. If our 2021 survey is any indication, doing so is one of the most significant underlying purposes of engaging with communities, but it’s just not a common practice in the field. It’s present, but perhaps not present enough.
Note: For both surveys, we sought responses from full and part-time newsroom employees, freelancers, researchers, and anyone working for journalism support organizations. We relied on redistribution to garner responses, requesting well networked organizations to distribute the survey via social media channels and newsletters. The 2018 survey yielded 37 responses, and the 2021 survey received 64 responses.
